A new landscape of exchange

Abstract

The field of architecture is extensively faced with densification and gentrification. In pre-war neighbourhoods there is a dilemma between adding housing stock and simultaneously improving the existing stock in terms of sustainability. In the contemporary society these neighbourhoods are distinguished as troubled areas with unilateral demographical social class, poverty, below-average health issues and poor quality of public space. Gentrification aims on one hand to introduce a new diversity in these neighbourhoods and on the other improve the quality of the public space. Without municipal interference, repression and displacement of current inhabitants becomes inevitable and the opposite of diversification occurs. Consequently, municipalities recognizes the phenomena and introduce new regulation to cope with the issue and prevent the displacement of inhabitants. By replacing the old stock of building they set the condition that social housing can’t be reduced and by densifying the already existing social housing should be rebuild. These visions result in a new social cohesion wherein different contradictory groups co-exist in the neighbourhood with more contrasts in society. Public buildings have to deal with tensions and contrasts of the site-specific condition in order to guide the process of gentrification and should offer an act of interchangeability in which groups can benefit from each other socially, culturally and personally. The negative connotation of gentrification can turned around with public building to function as precursor that emphasizes a new rich layer of exchange between all present groups. An interchangeability that is able, within the converging multiple purposes of the building, to lift contrast between the ‘gentrified’ and the ‘gentrifier’ and emphasise the notion of generic properties of human behaviour and stressing the interaction of cultural activities of exchange and equality.